Planned Parenthood Site Hacked Twice in One Week

Planned Parenthood closed down its website Wednesday after a second cyberattack within a week.

"We apologize, but our site is not available because of an extremist attack," a message on the site said late Wednesday. It added that "200,000 people a day are now being blocked from information and care by this attack."

Officials of the organization told The Hill that the site was the victim of a "denial of service attack," which sends huge amounts of traffic to its page at one time to shut it down.

"We deeply regret that in order to more fully protect our websites from these extremist attacks, our full online content will be temporarily unavailable to people looking for good, accurate health information," Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood’s political unit, told the Hill in a statement.

The group is "taking every measure possible to mitigate any criminal efforts to undermine our mission and services," she said.

The website was back up minutes after the attack, but Laguens told the Hill that officials decided to keep the site offline temporarily "to ensure that we are fully protected."

On Monday, Planned Parenthood said that anti-abortion hackers tried to access the website, possibly exposing sensitive data on its operations.

Laguens told the Hill that officials had told the Justice Department of the potential breach.